For the past two decades, Urban Dictionary has been the go-to website to source the meanings behind neologisms, acronyms and slang words, such as shook (“scared to death”); salty (“being upset over something little”); and gaslighting (“a form of psychological abuse”).
With the growth of the social media generation, new slang terms are introduced on a daily basis and quickly disseminated around the web.
While traditional dictionaries struggle to keep up with the ever-changing lexicon, Urban Dictionary has become an essential internet repository for new words, with more than seven million definitions stored on the site as of 2014.
The site proved invaluable during a 2003 UK court case in which a high court judge was forced to research words on Urban Dictionary such as “shizzle my nizzle” and “mish mish man” so he could rule in a copyright case between two rappers.
Founded by Californian computer science student Aaron Peckham in 1999, Urban Dictionary boasts some 80 million monthly users – and it has now become a hotbed of racist and sexist rhetoric.
To contribute to the lexicon of the dictionary, users must submit an entry that other users – so called “volunteer editors” – can choose to publish or not publish.
According to a 2013 New York Times article, at least five other site members must vote for a word for it to be published on the website. Despite the seemingly low threshold, Peckham insisted in the same article that some two-thirds of proposals were rejected.
But this anonymous crowdsourcing of words has led to Urban Dictionary coming under fire for some of the definitions listed on its site.
Last year, a Change.org petition demanding that racist definitions of the word “aboriginal” be removed from the website garnered almost 9,000 signatures.
According to Mashable, one post from 2005 defined aboriginals as “black people in Australia that are too lazy to get jobs and constantly force the government to give them an apology for nothing”.
While the posts were eventually removed, The Telegraph has found a significant number of racist, sexist, homophobic and other offensive definitions listed on the website. The lack of moderation is somewhat unsurprising given Peckham reportedly has no employees to help with the running of Urban Dictionary.
One term references the fictitious verb of “To Jew” which the author says means “to be screwed over or robbed of in some way ranging from the most innocuous to the most malicious actions, often in reference to money.”
The post, which has 122 “upvotes”, includes an example of how to use the verb in context: “Dude don’t try to jew me out of that 10 dollars or I’ll throw you in the oven with the rest of your family.”
A definition for abortion, which has 4,576 upvotes, states, “to kill a child before it becomes an inconvenience”, while the top definition for “black rights” states, “a silly little joke that black people make”. One definition for “woman” is “a manipulative human”.
Urban Dictionary’s posting guidelines state that “as an editor, you decide what gets published”. While racial and sexual slurs are fine to publish, it says, racist and sexist entries are not. It goes on to add: “Don't reject an entry because you disagree or are offended”.
In the New York Times profile, Peckham said he rarely edits the site or removes posts that might be deemed offensive, unless they include a person’s private information. He added that it was rare for definitions to be “really racist or sexist.”
Jonathon Green, a lexicographer and author of dictionaries such as Green’s Dictionary of Slang, says that slang is “aggressive, negative, cruel and above all sexist.”
He tells The Telegraph that when dealing with slang, “there is a certain amount of teeth-gritting that has to be accepted”.
“You can’t censor language, and that’s true of Urban Dictionary as well. Lexicographers have a right to state that certain words exist and that they are often derogatory. It is our job to show what the English language is all about, and that it has some rough edges. Slang is us at our most human.”
He says the problem with Urban Dictionary is that it is not a proper dictionary.
“The site does not differentiate between what has joined the English slang language and what is just a made-up word from a kid sitting at their computer trying to be naughty and shocking. You have to accept Urban Dictionary as a source of entertainment rather than a source of authority.”
According to academics at The Turing Institute who studied the language used on Urban Dictionary, the personal, informal and often offensive nature of the content on the site differed greatly from the content typically found in traditional dictionaries and digital rivals such as Wiktionary.
Dr Taha Yasseri, one of the report’s authors, said that one of his first observations when conducting the research was that there was a “large number of very offensive, racist and sexist posts” on the website. “However, we did notice that these definitions received generally less support than the inoffensive ones, according to the number of upvotes each had,” he said.
“The problem is that there is no top-down moderation. The mechanisms in place aren’t necessarily effective enough at removing offensive posts, so it would be better if the site had more resources to deal with the problem,” he added.
Data by analytics company Quantcast shows that Urban Dictionary is currently the 23rd most viewed website in the US, above the likes of LinkedIn, AOL.com and CNBC. And with the majority of its viewers at an impressionable age – between 18 and 24 – the abundance of offensive posts may be disconcerting to some.
But Green disagrees. “No one is forcing anyone to use slang. Yes it should be marked as reprehensible, but it should never be censored,” he said.
Urban Dictionary did not respond to The Telegraph’s request for comment.
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